What a vertiginous discussion we had today! To repurpose a Stalinist metaphor to radically un-Stalinist ends, I'm dizzy with its success at destabilizing all meaning, as frustrating and unbearably light as that situation may be.
In sync with this swiftly tilting planet the novel has us inhabit, we'll shake up the function of motif groups in our next class. (The groups, however, will remain the same.) Please channel Sabina by betraying the original assignment, and reverting to old forms of marginalia or improvising new ones for the next ULB-based meetings.
For this purpose, I'd like you to use the blog to post questions for your group to consider on Tuesday, tethered however you like to your side of a given existential code. At the same time, try to channel your observations or questions into the issues of publicity and privacy, politics and personal life, intimacy and history. We'll start with Havel, and take Tae's presentation as a springboard for small group and collective class discussion about these topics.
In sync with this swiftly tilting planet the novel has us inhabit, we'll shake up the function of motif groups in our next class. (The groups, however, will remain the same.) Please channel Sabina by betraying the original assignment, and reverting to old forms of marginalia or improvising new ones for the next ULB-based meetings.
For this purpose, I'd like you to use the blog to post questions for your group to consider on Tuesday, tethered however you like to your side of a given existential code. At the same time, try to channel your observations or questions into the issues of publicity and privacy, politics and personal life, intimacy and history. We'll start with Havel, and take Tae's presentation as a springboard for small group and collective class discussion about these topics.
As Tomas cycles through dozens of mistresses and each woman becomes more and more forgettable (he forgets the mistress who greets him in the middle of Prague), he blames Tereza for occupying most of his “poetic memory”: “Tereza occupied his poetic memory like a despot and exterminated all trace of other women” (208) (Reflecting, perhaps, the Red Occupation, and the constant surveillance that denied citizens of their privacy and caused paranoia seen within this section). Does this signify that although Tereza is holding him down, although she is a burden, she is saving him from an “unbearable lightness” that Sabina experienced as she pursued one adventure to another with little purpose? Or can be said that Tomas’s romps are of a different category than Sabina’s, that they aren’t purely for the thrill and that perhaps he does find purpose in adding to his large (200+, as he says at one point) array of mistresses? Maybe he finds “weight” in these affairs (but in a different, unburdening sense than with Tereza? And how does one reconcile with the difference in this weight between Tereza and the mistresses, or maybe neither one of them are weight-y at all? Ahhh so confusing).
ReplyDeleteOn a non-academic note (and this is not my final/"real" post), is anyone having a hard time reading this? Part 4 was hard enough what with Tereza's focus on her body, and I'm on pg. 202 of part 5, focusing on Tomas and his perspective on women. I am trying to distance myself from the literal characters and their thoughts/actions in order to think critically about the novel and appreciate what the author is saying or asking - but I'm having a very difficult time. I'm finding myself utterly revolted. Anyone else feel similarly?
ReplyDeleteI think it could be useful to spend some time interrogating the narrator's presence in the novel so far- particularly as it becomes known on page 221, where the narrator muses "The characters in my novels are my own unrealized possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of all of them and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I have circumvented (the border beyond which my own "I" ends) which attracts me most?" Can we safely assume that the narrator is Kundera himself? How does this passage inform our earlier conversation that worked to define the boundaries of the self? And finally, how does this model of writing compare to others that we have seen over the course of the semester (e.g. Nabokov, Shklovsky)?
ReplyDeleteI think what he's trying to do is universalize the novel. If every character represents unrealized possibilities (for the author, or us), they are connected to us as extensions of our imagined selves. This is what Kundera means by the "border"; if reality is an infinite continuum parallel to possibility, than there are innumerable possible expressions of the self that can be circumvented, that is, not actually lived. They exist in the novel as explorations. To be real, they must be attractive in some ways and horrifying in others. Nabokov disagrees: "this is the worst thing a reader can do, he identifies himself with a character in the book. This lowly variety is not the kind of imagination I would like readers to use."
DeleteI have been puzzling with this idea myself. I think that taking another look at "The Art of the Novel" offers some insight. For Kundera, characters represent "possibility". We can use certain existential codes to better understand them (i.e. Tereza's vertigo), but those words do not help us to understand ourselves or anyone else necessarily. That being said, we know that vertigo, for example, is a possibility for ourselves. Through writing, we have the ability to explore the hypothetical, the what might have been. To a certain extent, The Unbearable Lightness of Being is a book about writing and language. You ask if we can "safely assume" that the narrator is Kundera himself. Well I think that Kundera has demonstrated that it is safe to assume that it is never safe to assume--language is too unreliable/slippery for assumption.
DeleteI found some of the language about male and female genitalia interesting. It connects to the private and public concept. The author seemed to describe Sabina in a much more sexual and intimate way, never really saying the names of her sex organs, but blatantly saying "alien penis" in the same paragraph. I wonder if this is just the authors sexism we were told about initially, or if it was a comment more on the European culture? If it was rebelling to former censorship of sexual matters? Seems very different that the Man From MINAP, where they couldn't even utter "sex".
ReplyDeleteOne question that has been circulating for a while for me is Tereza's role as a bartender in the middle of Soul and Body. Her character in this space is not only a provider to the public in that she serves them drinks, but as a body for the male customers to observe and enjoy. I think it's crucial to note that Tereza play an utterly different character here and she is extremely disconnected here than from her life at home with Tomas or even in her home town. This is shown on the quote on page 162, where the bald man in the bar is yelling at Tereza because she is wearing pearls that he doesn't think are hers. He says "You can't tell me your husband gave them to you. A window washer!" Tomas is a doctor, yet nothing in Tereza moves to correct this statement.
ReplyDeleteWhat does this say about her character her? What does this scene have to do with Tereza's disconnection with her body, and the separation of her soul and body? What other scenes in the book can we connect with Tereza's disconnect?
Why does the author include his own voice in the novel, reminding us that what we are reading is a work of fiction instead of allowing us to get completely lost in the story? This happens again on pg. 221, starting with "This is the image from which he was born" and ending with "The novel is not the author's confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become."
ReplyDeleteThe idea of the amputated arm is interestingly visited several times in the text, first on page 136: "Gazing at the remains of the Old Town Hall, Tereza was suddenly reminded of her mother: that perverse need one has to expose one's ruins, one's ugliness, to parade one's misery, to uncover the stump of one's amputated arm and force the whole world to look at it." And again, on page 216: "Imagine having an arm amputated and implanted on someone else. Imagine that person sitting opposite you and gesticulating with it in your face. You would stare at that arm as at a ghost. Even though it was not your own personal, beloved arm, you would be horrified at the possibility of its touching you!" What does this fixation on a disconnected body part say about Kundera's overall message about the individual relationships we share with our bodies? The amputated arm is considered ugly or scary in both quotes -- does this mean he rejects being disconnected from one's body? What does it say about the body-soul dilemma?
ReplyDeleteI found one section in Part 5 interesting. It's the scene with Tomas and the "giraffe/stork-looking lady." As they get intimate, Tomas observes that "she was mimicking his moves with the precision of a mirror" (pg 205). Also, Tereza is associated with heaviness in this book. I thought it was interesting that Tomas described this woman as a giraffe, a presumably weighty animal. Maybe this second point isn't really anything, but in any of these ways/ other ways, is Tereza's existential code becoming a part of Tomas's too?
ReplyDelete